<p>Two Republican senators have split from their colleagues in calling for Donald Trump’s alleged rape of the author E. Jean Carroll to be investigated. Carrol, an advice columnist for Elle magazine, claims in an upcoming book about “hideous men” in her life that the US president forced himself on her in a changing room at New York’s Bergdorf Goodman department store in 1995 or 1996. She describes a “colossal struggle” in which Mr Trump entered her “halfway – or completely, I’m not certain”.</p>